Being the boss isn’t easy, and for most people, I would venture to say that having to fire someone is one of the least pleasant experiences out there.
That said, there will always be the people who make it easy (or even delightful), but those are rare.
These 15 people, though, get the award for making the experience as weird as f*cking possible.
15. Remember the days when you literally couldn’t wait another minute?
Fired a high schooler because his girlfriend kept showing up and they would disappear behind the racks. I told him his girlfriend was banned trying to not fire him and she kept sneaking back.
Worked in an office and they hired a girl from a temp agency to help me. She wouldn’t do anything unless I walked her through each step after telling her she had to do it. Hey an estimate just arrived on the fax RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, complete the quote and send it back. Come to find out she was playing spider and solitaire on her computer…… She was also sneaking out back and the warehouse guys thought she was doing drugs. I told my boss get rid of her, I would rather work alone than babysit her so he called the temp agency and told them to stop sending her. She showed up the next day so boss sent her home and called the agency saying hey she is useless stop sending her.
She showed up again the next day! This went on for over a week.
The people at the temp agency said they told her to stop showing but she kept coming in every morning, mind you usually 10 to 20 minutes late. My boss wouldn’t say anything to her face so finally I said hey we can’t afford to pay you so we had to let you go through the temp agency. They should have told you. She was all oh I thought they were joking. I was so glad she was gone.
14. I wonder what their cut was…
I work for a hotel.
Had to fire 2 separate employees on 2 different occasions for letting people in vacant rooms to smoke crack and steal from the rooms.
13. Did he not realize people counted that?
Dumbass stole a $100 bill out of the register at the end of his FIRST shift alone on register.
12. That is QUITE a story.
When I worked in hotels I was promoted to front desk manager. My first task was to hire someone. I ended up getting this very charismatic guy that was a little over the top but overall seemed like a solid employee. After I end up hiring him and on his first day he asked me if it’s okay if he carries his gun on him and I think that’s strange but it is his right and the owners honestly didn’t care so long as he had his license. he was never able to produce a license so he was never able to bring this handgun on the property. About a week into his employment we find out that he’s been calling guests specifically the really attractive females and asking them if they need any “overnight service”. we were very understaffed and my boss decided that instead of firing him we were going to take him off the desk and put him on basic groundsman duties. Part of these duties included driving the shuttle to the airport and back and also filling up the shuttle when it got low on fuel, which means that he had access to the gas card.
Our accountant confronts me one day about some very strange charges to the gas card apparently we had been filling up the shuttle near daily at anywhere between 20 to $45. We looked into it and got the surveillance footage from the gas station and it turns out was this kid filling up his friend’s cars and even his own car. When confronted he tells my boss that I said it was okay. Obviously that wasn’t true and they didn’t believe him. He ended up also being my first termination.
one of the other employees googled his name and found out he was a child predator. He was in a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old girl when he was 26. I also found out that day that we did not actually do background checks we just said we did and assumed anyone with a history wouldn’t bother applying.
11. That takes some special talent.
We had someone fall asleep at his desk with a lit cigarette in his hand. In a office full of cubicles like maybe… 6-7 years ago? Smoking wasn’t legal anywhere indoors let alone in an office building lmao
And the first time he wasn’t even fired. He was fired when it happened again!
10. That’s the opposite of the way things work.
I was a bartender/bar manager. This guy came in one night and said he was an aspiring DJ and asked if we would consider hiring him to come in just on Sunday nights to DJ for us. He said we wouldn’t have to pay him at first, he would just take tips and we could renegotiate after he helped to build up our Sunday night crowd.
He lasted less than 3 months. He drove away so much business and I got SO many complaints. He played the same songs every week and when people made requests (for commonly known songs), he had no idea who they (the musicians) were.
I had to fire someone who was working for free. He was a nice guy, which is the only reason he lasted as long as he did.
9. Talk about not having your head on straight.
Years ago, at a lumber company.
Had a guy, less than two hours after he started on his first day, pick up his car with a forklift and stand underneath it to see what was rattling when he drove.
8. George Costanza, 100%.
I worked retail, and we had an employee that would hide and take naps inside racks of clothes. Somehow that wasn’t the reason we fired her.
We fired her for stealing clothes and then wearing them to work.
7. You guys what on EARTH?
A guy shaved/trimmed off his pubes and left them scattered across a shared desk in a shared office.
When confronted, he pulled a George Costanza: “Oh, is that frowned upon?”
6. You can’t fix stupid.
I work at an art studio where we teach classes and sell pottery that our artists make for others to paint. I’m one of the artists and the manager.
I started getting a funny feeling about one of my employees.. she wasn’t doing anything blatantly wrong, just seemed to work really slowly sometimes, request insignificant but kinda odd schedule changes, and have different break habits from the other staff.
I started feeling like she was stealing but this is a really small business so I didn’t have her on camera or any way to really prove it… Until she accidentally sent me a video of herself painting pieces that I MADE from her home!
5. That seems extreme.
Not my personal experience, but one fellow contractor had a safety guy for 6 months. One weekend he took a trip out of town for non work related reasons. But used the company truck, and charged it all on the company credit card. On his way up there he ran a random person off the road, who just so happened to be one of the owners of another contractor who works closely with the one who employed this guy. Shortly after he was fired and I’m sure criminal charges were being brought against him.
A couple weeks later his wife calls his former employer saying he had called her randomly and killed himself in his truck on the side of the highway. Me and another colleague went searching for records of this guy, couldnt find anything no claims of a suicide in the local paper where he supposedly killed himself at. Thought it was wierd but whatever. It turns out this guy falsified all his qualifications and job experience.
Fast forward a month later, and I heard through the grapevine that the original contractor who had employed this guy recieved a call from some contractor across country because he applied for work there and put them down as his previous employer.
He faked his own death to get out of trouble with the company then proceeded to put them down on his resume not expecting anyone to check his references lol.
4. A double whammy.
Had an employee that was going to get fired for simply showing up late constantly with no legit reason.
During the term meeting she tells me another employee cut the brake lines in her car – it’s obvious this was to save her from being fired. She didn’t realize that something like that gets cops involved.
She was termed, and then detectives showed up to her house to get statements. Of course, no evidence of lines being cut and now she’s dealing with police for making false statements.
3. Cookie Monster pants, for real?
My coworker at a coffee shop.
Told a customer she didn’t feel like making x drink and she should go elsewhere.
Wore cookie monster PJ pants while we had a very strict “black or khaki pants, no jeans, no leggings” policy at the time.
couldn’t figure out the concept of milk?? This still baffles me to this day. Like I was trying to show her how to steam milk properly, she was off in la la land and when she snapped back into the conversation asking, “What are we doing again” followed by me reminding her and she quite literally asked what was in the gallon jug that I poured into the metal pitcher. I told her it was milk and she just looked at me, her eyes saying, ‘???!??!!?”She was there for 2 days.
2. This is just awful and sad at the same time.
Not too crazy. More stupid than crazy.
One of the programmers on my team was sitting at his desk looking at porn. And this is cubicle land. No offices. My Director walked into the area to talk to me and saw it. Then it was the first thing he told me about, so I got up and walked over for a look myself and there it was. Me and the Director looked at each and I said I gotta take care of this.
So we walked back to HR, I told them what was going on and what we saw and they told me to fire him. So I did.
He lost a $110K job for looking at porn on his computer at work.
1. Black magic is definitely frowned upon.
Fired a guy for looking to pay someone to cast black magic on the owner and the owner’s family to bewitch them into giving him a raise and, ironically, never firing him. Only reason I found out was because he asked someone else in the office for help in finding a witch doctor to cast the spells and word got round. No one wanted to be in the same room as him after that.
When I confronted him he said the devil made him do it so it wasn’t his fault. I live in the Middle East. I definitely did not wake up expecting to fire someone for black magic that day. Side note: practicing black magic is literally a death sentence here.
I feel like each and every one of these employers would have done well as George Costanza’s boss in Seinfeld, don’t you?
Have you ever had to let someone go for a completely bizarre reason? Please share it with us in the comments!
